Openbook Creator Offers Privacy Design Solution for Facebook

Facebook’s getting lots of advice these days on how to get out of the current jam it’s in over its recent, ambitious drive to put itself at the center of the net by pushing users to be more public.

One of the best is a call from Will Moffat, a San Francisco-based coder who created a site called Openbook that lets searchers see what people have written in status updates that are public to the world. Many of those — try a search on DUI — fall squarely in the category of “too much information.”

Moffat, who says that “Facebook has a moral obligation to protect their users,” has a simple idea:a slider on a user’s profile page, with a promise from Facebook never to move it more toward public without getting permission first.

“Dragging to the right makes everything public. Dragging to the left makes everything private. Simple. Just how it should be,” Moffat’s site suggests.

When Facebook does unveil its new controls in the coming days or weeks, Moffat’s example will make for an interesting comparison.

Moffat calls himself an “accidental activist,” pulled into the ongoing debate after he built Openbook just to see what people were posting publicly.

Now he’s angry.

“They are trying to change society to make it less private,” Moffat said. “But given they have such a monooply on social networking, I think they have a moral responsibility to respect social norms.”